Futility.

"It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone." 

"It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility."

(Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)

I have two jobs: one I like and one like the ones Palahnuik satirizes in Fight Club--the kind where I stare at a computer all day and do meaningless things like manually uncapitalize all the capital letters of the first terms in pages of lists or find every instance of italics in a two hundred page history text and change them to bold. I stare at my screen, slack-brained, and navigate my little pointer to each little superscript number above a footnote, highlighting the number and only the number--if I accidentally include a space I have to try again--to double-check if InDesign has really styled it as a superscript. Over the course of a week I may do this five hundred times.

I also write accessibility text. The inclusion of accessibility text is a legal requirement in web-based course design, because blind people who may want to participate in your web-based course cannot see the images on the screen and therefore do not have the same learning opportunities as a seeing student. Every image in the course, then, informative or not--a diagram of a Langerhans cell or a graphic of a grinning cartoon student in the margin--must be explicitly described in accessibility text so blind people don't miss out. I'm working on a high school anatomy course right now, and today I wrote accessibility text for detailed diagrams of deep muscles. And then I realized something. My work will never matter to another human being unless by some mad chance a blind high school student signs up for an almost entirely visual online anatomy course. And just like that, the laughable and overwhelming futility of the hours I spend at that cursed screen turned into a metaphor for my entire job.